A personal take on career development
With a pinch of inspiration by Carter Cast
I recently read ‘The Right — and Wrong — Stuff: How Brilliant Careers Are Made and Unmade’ by Carter Cast and the book made a strong impression on me. With this article, I would like to share my personal take on the book and how I try to use his recommendations in my career development.
What is the book about?
According to Cast, we all have ‘blind spots’, when it comes to our career development and performance. The ‘blind spots’ are preventing us to see how our work attitude, behaviour and execution of tasks are derailing our career.
He presents 5 archetypes of work behaviour, which we should all avoid, but also how to recognize, if we are one of them or more than one. In the end, he gives advice on how to excel professionally and what are the right stuff and wrong stuff, when it comes to career development.
Cast perfectly portraits some of the pitfalls we all have in our careers and how we should handle them when they occur. I’ve read different books on such topics and this one is the best so far. So if you haven’t already read it, I definitely recommend it.
My take on the book
I was/am in a part of my life when I am starting to question my career choices. I’ve been encountering frustration at my workplace, which has created a lot of negative energy, lack of motivation to continue delivering results and work on projects. Then I started questioning myself what could be the reason for that, why I feel miserable during the week and not having any desire to wake up in the morning and go to work. Right about this time, Cast’s book entered my life and it made total sense.
According to Cast, self-reflect, self-aware and self-regulate are critical points towards achieving high performance. Of course, the theory behind these terms have been around for a while, but Cast manages to provide real examples from his work and relates them with practical and easy to follow steps.
A self-reflect in its essence is the ability to exercise introspection and to learn more about your inner purpose and nature. This ultimately leads to better self-awareness, the ability to monitor your emotions and thoughts and better understand yourself. Lastly, self-regulate, once we are able to reflect and monitor our feelings, we will be able to control them, in order to reach a positive outcome.
Even though it sounds good in theory, it is not easy to follow. It takes time, patience and hard work to start self-reflecting and being self-aware of your emotions, affected by outside surroundings and events. To notice when you feel frustrated in a particular situation, be able to explain why and learn to self-regulate.
I have been in situations, where others have been taking credit for work that I’ve personally done. This can be frustrating and can make you feel betrayed, alone and underappreciated at the workspace.
The point here is to understand why this causes all those negative feelings. Is it because you can’t stand for yourself and defend your work and contribution? Maybe…
This is what I particularly found about myself. I didn’t have the voice and confidence, I wanted to have. In such situations, I didn’t know how to communicate in a constructive way. It was a challenge to deliver an objective assessment of the problem, which will not cause negative tension in the team afterwards.
Today, I am still working on this and trying to apply very much the learning from another book: ‘Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High’ by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron Mcmillan and Al Switzler. By applying self-reflection in such situations, I was able to achieve better self-awareness and not give power to my sometimes negative attitude to blindside me and ruin my career performance.
After being aware and able to define your feelings what is next?
Self-regulate has been the hardest thing for me because it meant to face weakness/areas of improvement about myself and my performance. I didn’t want to face and find a way to reach a better outcome than just feeling miserable.
The point of this is that I not only started self-reflecting on the particular frustrating encounters and how to change them but also on the job as a whole. Was I in the right place? Does this job fulfil all my career and personal expectations for development? For this part, I had to understand what I wanted from a workplace. Here, again Cast didn’t disappoint. In the book, he presents 5 Fundamentals to understand your motives and how to make better career choices.
The 5 Fundamentals
- Achievement i.e. ‘the need to constantly improve your performance and to accomplish challenging goals’
- Affiliation i.e. ‘the need for maintaining close, friendly relationships with below and the desire to the part of a group’
- Power i.e. ‘the need of having an influence on other’
- Autonomy i.e. ‘the desire to have control over your work and the ability to determine the direction you want to go to’
- Purpose or ‘the need to be part of something bigger than yourself’
Based on this, I have a clear affiliation towards achievement, autonomy and purpose. I want to work for a company, which has a deeper purpose rooted in creating shared value and positive change in the world. I as well enjoy defining my way of working and appreciate to receive constructive feedback and have clear expectations of my role. This exercise really made me rethink if the place, where I spend more than 60% of my daily hours is the right place. A question, I am still trying to find the answer to.
Final thoughts
I have been through several years of work experience, failing and succeeding professionally, which has given me food for thoughts. You don’t need 10/15 years of work experience, operating with a ‘blind side’ before something or someone helps you to realize it is time to change. Some people never get to that realization.
We are spending more than 60% of our time during the day at work. We should be better aware of what our behaviour is and how to change it. We need to understand what drives us and what we want from our workplace and make the right career choice. Life is to short to make many bad choices. Cast’s book can give you a good overview of the right and wrong career development stuff.
A tip about the book
Start first with ‘The wrong stuff derailment assessment’, which is at the end of the book. Then you will be able to objectively answer the questions, without thinking ‘oh I read about this archetype…I am definitely not like her.’ Don’t led your system 1 makes biases choices. :)
Thank you for reading the article!
